A review by gigiivid
Dangerous Creatures by Kami Garcia

2.0

I read this because I needed a book to read on a train in Spain, and they had exactly 10 English books on sale and this was the only one that remotely interested me. I knew that I hadn't read the previous series and so I would be slow to catch on to things while reading the book, but in the end it wasn't really a problem. Maybe I missed some nuances, but overall I think it wasn't so complex as to need 4 previous books to explain itself.

This just felt short and rushed. There were so many conclusions jumped to and so much characterisation missing that I feel like it has been severely edited. If it were double the length, it would probably make two times more sense. Again, maybe I'm missing something from not having read the previous series, but the parts that I thought were rushed felt organic to this book.

I actually quite liked the main character, but the rest not so much. The boyfriend Link and Ridley did not have any chemistry, and when one character said "she treats you like shit" I felt like the real explanation was that they just....didn't really talk to each other or actually know each other. It felt the same for most characters in the book and in every interaction they had. Nox's obsession with Ridley was confusing and explained away with a one liner that still didn't really connect all the dots. Overall, the characterisation just wasn't great, and the plot was also very minimal and kind of just jumped from A to B.

However, I did enjoy some parts of it, I think it evoked a sense of place and style that some other authors struggle with. I would like to read the original series to see if it is any better, and if the characters still seem so....foreign to each other.